- Hey folks. Edgar B. Herwick III here
from GBH's Curiosity Desk, where you ask questions
and I find answers. Today, we are on location in the kitchen to answer a question
from Wayne Firstenberg, from Northborough. - I'm a banana guy, Monday through Friday at my routine meals and that's
my snack late in the day. And then some days, I don't feel like having it or I don't get to it. And you know, the bananas get older. - And when those bananas get older, a few unwelcome guests tend to appear. - Where do fruit flies come from when my fruit is rotting? It seems like an annoying miracle that they just suddenly
appear out of nowhere. (upbeat music) - Shakespeare may have
asked, what's in a name? But in the case of fruit flies, we'd be wise to take a moment
to examine the moniker, especially because the little bugs that are messing with Wayne's bananas, aren't really fruit flies at all. - The real fruit flies are
another group of organisms in the group Tephritidae. If you're in Australia or,
you know, warmer climates, and you're talking about
fruit flies in your garden or fruit flies attacking your crops, that's the fruit fly you're
probably talking about. - Here in the US, what we call fruit flies
are actually members of a completely different
family of insects, Drosophilidae. And there's about 4,000 different species, a handful of which we tend
to see around the house. And here's the weird thing, they don't even eat fruit. - When we say fruit flies, we kind of expected this
animals attacking your fruit and you know, ruining your fruit. And that's not true for the Drosophilas, they're attracted to
overripe and rotten fruit. And they're not, their larvae are not actually
consuming much of the fruit. They're actually more
interested in the yeast and bacteria and things that
are growing on rotten fruit. - This is why some scientists have advocated for
calling them pumice flies or vinegar flies instead of fruit flies. - They are attracted to particular smells. So things like vinegar, acetic acid, those odors are really
attractive to females because that's an indicator
of the kind of environment that they're looking for. - And they're looking for
that kind of an environment to lay eggs. And a typical kitchen is
a fruit fly dream home. Fruit bowls, yes. Garbage cans, check. Kitchen drains, affirmative. All prime locations to lay eggs. And man, can they do that. Typical fruit fly breeds at a pace that would make rabbits blush. - Female fruit fly can
lay roughly 100 eggs a day and she can live for around
a month in some cases. So, overtime, that's hundreds and hundreds of eggs per female, if the conditions are right. - Fruit flies mature fastest
in warm temperatures. So we tend to see more
of them in the summer, when we also have a lot of
fresh fruits and veggies around. Now, we conditions are right, fruit flies can go from egg
to adult in just over a week. So you can easily have a
scenario where just two or three tiny little
fruit flies make their way into your kitchen through
a window or a door, totally undetected and a week later, you literally have
hundreds of them being born and bred right there in your kitchen. - It does feel like they
come out of nowhere, but that's because the
larva of fruit flies, the babies are really, really small. So they're so small that
most folks won't notice them if you're just kind of
casually looking for where they come from. - And yes, that does mean
that if you pick up a banana on say, a Thursday and
a small colony emerges, there is a chance that you have eaten some of their siblings earlier in the week. - Oh, I guarantee
everybody has already eaten quite a lot of insect eggs and
insect parts in their lives. That's just protein. It's fine. Like, it's not gonna hurt. - And while their unique
combination of size and speed makes them a
particularly pesky pest in the kitchen, it has also helped them
thrive in another location, the research lab. - Even though they look
really alien and different, fruit flies share a lot
of the basic biochemistry, genetics, neurology, all of
those things with humans. And so they've become like
the lab rat of science, except even more so than a lab rat. - We can thank the Drosophilas for a whole bunch of
our recent breakthroughs in fields like medicine, biochemistry and genetics. In fact, no fewer than six
Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists for breakthroughs
that they have made researching the humble fruit fly. So in conclusion, the fruit
fly, bothersome on bananas, but a boom for biochemistry. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And perhaps most importantly, let me know what you are curious about and all of those questions
that have been bugging you, because, hey, I might
just look into it for you. I'm Edgar B. Herwick III,
stay curious out there. (upbeat music) I'm actually hungry, this is really good. - [Narrator] The Curiosity
Desk is sponsored by Emerson college, inspiring curiosity and creative expression in all of us.
